Orietta Crispino prepares dinner for the audience in Let Me Cook for You.
Like René Magritte’s painting of a pipe with the sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) beneath it, Orietta Crispino writes “This is not about the past” on the wall behind her early in her solo show Let Me Cook for You. But over the next two-plus hours she talks a lot about her mother—deceased since 1994—as well as about the relatives she lived with growing up, her attempt at age 17 to meet the father she’d only recently learned was still alive, and the many times she has moved (at least 35 total in four different places in Italy and the U.S.). In other words: about the past.
Crispino also cooks a meal for her small audience—a maximum of 15 people per performance—during the first hour of Let Me Cook for You. She spends the second hour going through boxes and hangers of clothing—most of it couture, much of it vintage—and relating how she acquired certain pieces, what she thinks of them, when she remembers wearing them. And for the play’s coda, the audience sits in the dark listening to her describe a visit to Roman churches.
The show by Italian actress Crispino deals with some classic Italian subjects: fashion, food, Catholicism and art.
Let Me Cook for You may be unlike anything you’ve ever seen—although The Last Supper, which writer Ed Schmidt performed in the kitchen of his Brooklyn home in 2002, comes to mind—and it may be unlike anything you want to see. It doesn’t grab you right away, opening with Crispino lying on a table, back to the audience, not even stirring for a couple of minutes. When she does get up and speak, it’s to lament “the obsession with beauty” (a topic she doesn’t really return to). She seems worn out and exasperated.
Soon she’s talking about food, then about the compassion an actor must have. “There’s no one before me and no one after me, and I still have all of these women inside!” she says. She writes her favorite numbers on a paper on the wall, the names of her grandmother and mother, a few other words; she adds “Piercing into the future” to the paper with “This is not about the past.”
Where is all this going? you might wonder. Crispino hands out laminated cards with horoscopes on them, and calls on some audience members to read theirs aloud. And where’s that meal I was promised? you might wonder, too, as Crispino goes on with random thoughts and abrupt subject changes—no dish, pot or food in sight, though she spends some time folding napkins.
So the show gets off to a slow and bewildering start. Stick with her, though, because a narrative of sorts does take shape. Or at least you get to know Crispino pretty well. She reveals quite a bit about herself on matters large and small—her performance has a script but often seems improvised, so cumulatively the scenes feel like an evening gabbing with (or listening to) a friend about food, clothes, family, art.
Some people might find it self-indulgent and disjointed all the way through. I started to warm to it late in the first act—around the time we were being served a tofu vegetable stir-fry over ginger rice, plus wine—and was duly edified by the time Crispino brought up the lights after the scene in the dark, ready to cut us pieces of a fresh panettone she had special-ordered from a bakery in Sicily. I neither own nor covet any designer clothing but still got a kick out of Crispino’s fashion show–cum–closet cleanout, during which she continues sharing memories and opinions, as she had while chopping and sautéing veggies in the previous act.
Crispino is artistic director of Theaterlab, which coproduced Let Me Cook for You with Cherry Lane Alternative. Photographs by Gaia Squarci.
Crispino and her director and co-creator Liza Cassidy call Let Me Cook for You a trilogy, composed of the same-named first act; the clothing segment, titled This Would Look Good on You; and the brief third part, Let Us Dream. Their promotional material describes the production as “a collage of inherited myths and apocryphal histories” spotlighting “the intoxicating act of storytelling”—which is a clear and accurate summary of what this occasionally unclear and hard-to-summarize show offers.
Crispino, who lived in Italy into her thirties, might recount a conversation or describe something in her native language before expressing it in English. This adds to the spontaneous feel of her performance and, since it’s Italian, adds passion to her storytelling. Her peculiar show also attests to the universal magic of theater: The sparkle in Crispino’s eyes when she recalls memorable stage productions she’s seen and her recitation in Italian of Prospero’s epilogue from The Tempest provide stirring proof of its power to span borders.
Let Me Cook for You runs through May 28 at Theaterlab (357 W. 36th St.). Performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Friday and Saturday and at 5 p.m. Sunday; for more information, visit theaterlabnyc.com.
Playwright: Orietta Crispino
Direction: Liza Cassidy
Sets: Elena Vannoni
Lighting: Eric Nightengale
Sound: Asa Marder
